This paper examines the implications for academic careers of the apparent global trend towards marketisation and managerialism in higher education with reference to the UK and Germany. It discusses how university employers might exercise greater control over their employees, privileging research and international publication, and fragmenting the traditional unity of the academic role. The effect is to challenge the values of academic communities, subject individuals to greater uncertainty, competition and insecurity, and influence the shape and direction of academic careers. The paper notes how todayÕs academic careers could be understood in terms of KanterÕs three forms of career as well as the boundaryless and protean career. However, it argues that these approaches do not address the key issue in both the UK and German cases: the changed locus and exercise of power within the employment relationship. It concludes that, to understand how careers are changing, this power relationship and the context of career in general have to be taken into account.
This paper reports the results of empirical research designed to explore the impact of research selectivity on the work and employment of academic economists in U.K. universities. Research selectivity is seen as part of the general trend toward "managerialism" in higher education in both the U.K. and abroad. Managerialism based on performance indicators and hierarchical control has been contrasted with collegiate control-based or informal peer review. However, analysis of the academic labor process has idealized collegiate relations at the expense of professional hierarchies and intellectual authority relations. We argue that in the U.K., there has evolved a mainstream economics which is located within a well-defined neoclassical core. We find that the existence of lists of core mainstream journals which are believed to count most in the periodic ranking exercise poses a serious threat to academic freedom and diversity within the profession, institutionalizing the control which representatives of the mainstream exercise over both the academic labor process and job market. In this way, managerialism combines with peer review to outflank resistance to new forms of controlling academic labor at the same time as reinforcing disciplinary boundaries through centralized systems of bureaucratic standardization and control.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.